


the kiss.

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Series: i look at you and there's no speech left in me [12]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Fluff, JATP Secret Santa 2020, M/M, Multi, in which there is kissing and aching and longing, in which willie loses his stamp, in which willie makes assumptions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28294959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: Alex laughs. It’s a soft thing, hidden in the sleeves of his hoodie and wedged in between one breath and the next, a beat and the next – a kiss, and then the next. Willie doesn’t laugh with him. Instead he lies, splayed open, with his open hands and his open eyes and his open, beating heart, in Alex’ lap, and watches as Sunset Curve weave music together; three stranded and alive. It drops from Luke’s laughter into Reggie’s lap and then; into Alex’ hands, calloused.
Relationships: Alex Mercer/Luke Patterson/Reggie Peters/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms), Alex Mercer/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms)
Series: i look at you and there's no speech left in me [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2015690
Comments: 17
Kudos: 62





	the kiss.

> _I have found a stone, this morning, and in it, I found the world. It was trapped in a bubble, see, a petrified thing; polished until the stone could barely hold its weight, so thin its walls that I thought it might shatter from the touch of my palms. When this water was in a pond, still, our continents had not yet split. When this water was not yet frozen shut; it saw this earth move._
> 
> _Can you fathom that?_
> 
> _I hold it in my hands – rough, calloused things; trembling – any move might break it and spill this water; world; on these shoes that have never known leather. Any move might make my lungs ache and my skin split and my life shatter along with these shards._
> 
> _I wonder, idly, with my teeth sharp things buried in my own flesh, who first found this stone. I wonder, with trembling bones, who might have found the world encased in quartz and polished it until it almost spilled from its bubble._
> 
> _For this year’s celebrations, I gift you that stone._

Willie’s wrist itches. His skin feels slack, and loose over his bones somehow, now that it’s no longer pulled taut, from the tips of his teeth to the edges of his fingers, or maybe from the crack in his skull to the burning of his toes. Or perhaps; stretched from Alex’ lips in the corners of his mouth to his hands in a soft beat on his hips. There’s something spun about them, like glass stained pink; blue; red.

Alex laughs. It’s a soft thing, hidden in the sleeves of his hoodie and wedged in between one breath and the next, a beat and the next – a kiss, and then the next. Willie doesn’t laugh with him. Instead he lies, splayed open, with his open hands and his open eyes and his open, beating heart, in Alex’ lap, and watches as Sunset Curve weave music together; three stranded and alive. It drops from Luke’s laughter into Reggie’s lap and then; into Alex’ hands, calloused.

Instead, he reaches up to tangle his hands with the flush in Alex’ cheeks or perhaps; the corners of his smile – the edges of his canines. Alex’ beat stutters on the arm of the couch, and he looks down at Willie and the way his hair and his breath spill from him.

He smiles.

Willie takes a second to remember the breath stuck in his chest. It’s a fluttering thing against the way his skin feels against Alex’ legs, against Alex’ hands, against Alex’ rhythm dripping from him and onto his pink hoodie. He takes a breath, and Alex leans down to kiss him, a soft, tender thing caught in between them and the rest of Sunset Curve – something like a tuned string; pulled taut.

“Did it work?”, Reggie says, just as Alex starts pulling out of the kiss, his cheeks flushed and red. Willie hums and turns his head. His palms are itching, and Alex presses his lips against them.

“Did what work?”

Reggie picks at his bass, and it makes a low sound against his fingertips. “The kissing, I mean.”

Alex had pulled Willie in by the hands, and by his life, and by the mark on his wrist, and he’d kissed him like he drums; like the whole world is a stage to light up, like its made up of a song tangled somewhere between them. He’d kissed him, with all the trembling ache in both of their bones; with the pain in Alex’ stomach and the crack in Willie’s skull and Julie’s hug still lingering in Alex’ hair; he’d kissed him. The mark had vanished like someone pulled pins out of Willie’s skin; as if Caleb had fixed strings to his wrist strong enough to pull his whole world in between those canine teeth. As if, somehow, kissing Alex made the pins too dull to stay in place.

Willie tilts his head. “The kissing?”

Reggie nods, and plucks at another string. This one sounds fuller, somehow. “We were brainstorming, dude”, he says, and his smile stretches across his face; a dimpled, flushed thing blooming from the edges of his mouth. “And that was kind of the only thing we could come up with to help you get rid of that mark. I mean, we were all pretty sure it wasn’t actually going to work, but, like, we had to try, right?”

 _We_ , he says, like it wasn’t Alex’ lips on his own, and Alex’ hands on his hips and Alex’ skin pressed against his own. Like it wasn’t his life in knots with the unravelling thread at the bottom of Alex’ jumper. The fabric of Alex’ jeans rubs against Willie’s cheek and Willie hums softly.

“It worked”, he says, and thinks of his mother and the way she would paint the entire world into the palms of his hands. “I don’t remember you trying, though. Or Luke. Odd, that.”

Reggie’s flush blooms further, a deeper shade of red, a gape of his mouth, his bass thrumming into the space stretched between the four of them. Luke behind him giggles softly. Alex has gone very still underneath Willie’s fingertips. There’s a tremble in the air somewhere between them, and it’s in that silence that Willie realises why Alex can never sit still.

None of these boys have talked to each other about the way they live from the same beat and the same music and the same light in their eyes. None of these boys have ever talked to each other about Reggie’s blush or Luke’s words or the way Alex goes soft and glass-stained when he looks at them, the way he does when he touches Willie. He’s been kissing Willie’s wrist whenever he could put away his drumsticks, with a look of silent awe on his face, like he can’t quite believe that Willie is here to be kissed. Somewhere in those kisses, the edges of them have smeared into splashes of colour painted across Willie’s wrist. Somewhere in between Alex kissing him like Willie’s life depends on it, and Willie lying with his whole life pried open in Alex’ lap, he’d looked at the way Sunset Curve melt into one another and he’d just assumed –

Luke wraps his hands around Reggie, with his voice too big to fit into his body, or into his songs, and Reggie looks at him like he single handedly strung up the world by the spotlights pointed at them all, or perhaps by the microphone they share in every performance Willie has ever seen. Reggie reaches for Alex with his bass-calloused hands, and his voice an awed tangle, and in his eyes, if he tilts his head, Willie can see all the years they’ve spent in tandem with one another. Alex smiles at Luke like sugar; spun, and Willie can’t help but drop into the threefold thrum of them, with his breath caught at the back of his throat.

“Willie”, Alex says, in a voice much too small for his ribcage, and Willie looks at him, and the way his cheeks are flushed – a mirror of Reggie’s. “I don’t think-” He doesn’t keep talking. Instead, he pulls Willie’s hand to his lips. Luke pulls up a chair, and then he tilts his head, the way Willie remembers a bird of prey doing when it spots a mouse; or perhaps a hare running across a field.

“Would you want us to?”, he asks, with his head still cocked, with Willie’s heartbeat between his teeth and caught up in Reggie’s blush. “I mean, your stamp is gone, dude, but no one says we can’t still kiss you.”

Somehow, he can feel the pins or maybe Caleb’s teeth wedged into his skin again when Luke looks at him like that, when Reggie blushes like that, like a meadow in bloom. He presses a kiss against Alex’ hand. “Sorry, man”, he says, his voice a viscous thing, “I kind of assumed you guys were all, like, together. Forget I said anything.”

“Why?”, Reggie says softly, and puts down his bass. Alex still hasn’t moved. Willie kisses his hand again.

“I don’t think this is a conversation you guys should have with me here.” He shrugs. “You guys gotta talk about this with each other, first.”

Reggie sits down on the couch, like he’s balancing a knife on its edge. “Why?”, he asks again, a soft thing. “You’re with Alex. Doesn’t that automatically involve you? What do you want?”

Willie doesn’t open his mouth. He doesn’t say _I want the world and I want Alex’ hands and Luke’s voice and Reggie’s blushing laughter, I want everything edged into the lines on the palms of my hands, from the first breath this earth took to its last, I want the birth of the sun in my ribcage and the heat death of the universe in my bones. I want it all._

Instead, he shrugs. Alex takes a stuttering breath. Luke hasn’t stopped looking at them, and Reggie is still wide eyed and flushed between them all.

“I’d kiss you”, says Luke softly, “all of you.” He looks at Alex, and there’s something about him that morphs into something that feels a little like a lake that has just frozen over, the coat of it thin enough that a touch of a finger can break it. Willie doesn’t dare breathe. He can’t quite fathom how to.

“Would you?” Alex’ voice is a quiet thing, muffled by Willie’s hand. Luke nods, and reaches for him, with his rough, calloused hands.

“Yeah, bro”, he says, leans in closer, until Willie can feel the fabric of his shirt brush against his cheek. “I’ve been wanting to kiss you since we went to go see Jurassic Park in ’93 and then spent hours talking about it in the garage.”

Alex pulls him in by his shirt into a kiss, and somehow, that’s what bursts the bubble of silence around them. Somehow, Willie buries his head in Alex’ lap as he tangles himself with Luke, somehow Reggie crouches down next to them, still flushed, and slack-mouthed. Somehow, Reggie kisses him, a burst of red.

Somehow, they end up tangled with one another on this couch.


End file.
